Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method of texture encoding and decoding.
Description of the Prior Art
The “background” description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description which may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly or impliedly admitted as prior art against the present invention.
Textures are images (for example, bitmaps) that are applied to geometric surfaces in videogames and other computer graphics applications. In the case of videogames, a typical level or region of an in-game environment may have hundreds of textures associated with it, providing the imagery for each individual object and element of the environment.
As a consequence, loading textures into memory becomes an appreciable component of the loading time for a videogame, and it is desirable to reduce this.
One solution is to compress the textures; for example by compressing bitmaps to a format with lower redundancy, so converting some of the overhead in terms of storage into overhead in terms of processing needed to subsequently decompress and use the textures.
It is desirable therefore to obtain good compression in return for the effective cost of increased decompression processing, or conversely to reduce the decompression overhead for a given level of compression, particularly for portable devices where a processing overhead leads to a reduction in battery life.
The present invention seeks to address or mitigate this need.